Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang Food Explained Pt. 1

Oh, this is like exactly what our grandmother. You guys know the Chinese love the double, triple entendres when it comes to naming food. There's a great ratio between fat and meat. The garlic is very subtle, but but strong and apparent at the same time. A lot of this food kind of gets clumped in under the larger umbrella of Shanghainese food. You hear about China every day in the media in some good ways and some bad ways, but lately it's probably been more of the latter. But what do you even know about China? I'm sure you've had Chinese food, but do you know what region it's from? That's why we started this series. What are you actually eating? We're going to break down the cuisine of China in 12 different regions, and we never even have to leave Manhattan. By the time you're done watching this series, you should know your stuff. First up is the Shanghai Jiangsu Zhejiang Watertown region near the Yangtze River, most famous for the xiaolongbao soup dumpling. The flavors are light, umami, sweet, and there's a lot of wine and bamboo accents. All right, guys, in today's video, we're going to be exploring so many different levels of the Shanghai Jiangsu Watertown cuisine. But this is probably tier one. Chile is providing you an imperial experience in terms of the cuisine from that region. They take their food very seriously, but they also take the decor seriously, too. Inside, you'll see that they are trying to remake what is supposed to be a Hangzhou village from the Song dynasty, which is over a thousand years ago. OK, so the English name is Chili. The Chinese name is Chili, Zhi being the Zhi from Zhejiang. So I guess you could say, That's a tongue twister. Let's go, man. We are looking at a Song dynasty imperial feast fit for Emperor Zeng Zong, the third emperor of the Song dynasty. As far as ingredients, you see a lot of light flavors, kind of sweet, a lot of yellow wine as well. Obviously, this shrimp looks like it doesn't have a lot of flavor, but it's smoked with the tea leaf flavor. This is the wine crab. Obviously, you know, nothing is very spicy on the table. All right, here I got the wine soaked crab. It's a little bit sticky on top. They take it apart for us. I've never actually had this. I don't believe I've had Shanghainese blue crabs before when everybody eats at a certain time of year. But this is something else, man. This is Zui Xian, drunken crab. Kablami. Wow. I'm just going to be eating a lot of the little pieces of the crab, which you can digest because this crab is so small and soft. Andrew, in Shanghainese, there's another dish called Qing Chao Xia. This is not this. This is Longjing shrimp. It looks the same, though. We will have the other one. But this is way better, to be honest. This is a very delicate way to cook shrimp. Lightly smoked. You just dip it with a little bit of this kind of sweet vinegar. Almost like a nice shrimp and cocktail. Wow. One thing you're going to notice about this regions of food is that if it's not really sweet, it could be very, very light. And some people are going to say, oh, it doesn't have a lot of flavor, but the flavor is going to be very light and nuanced. All right, you guys, we have two Jiangnan fish dishes right here. I've got a crispy fish and which almost just looks like a, you know, crispy fish that could also be from the Cantonese region. But there's a lot of crossover. A lot of southern regions will eat fish like this. This is seasoned. It's fried. And then it's laying on a small puddle of soy sauce that's their own. And then here I have the smoked fish. Now, this is something that you're going to see throughout this video. Back in the day, it's supposed to be smoked. But I think this one's fried. It's very, very sweet, very sticky, very crispy. And I like this dish a lot. Some people argue that this dish originates in Wuxi. Some argue that it's from Shanghai. Well, let me just tell you, Shanghai is going to get the credit for a lot of dishes in this region because it's the biggest city. But, you know, who really knows? It's from the general region. All right, you guys, our next two imperial style dishes, meaning that they're executed at a very fancy level, even beyond their regular versions, are Qianlong's favorite eel. Even more than Peking duck, who knows? Maybe he tried to call it Qianlong's duck, you know, but he didn't get the name. So he got the eel. The root of it is from the Hangzhou, you know, Watertown region. Why do you think it's considered so fancy? Is it because kind of the food down here is cooked so delicately with care? I heard historically it was the first place in China to be considered rich. And still to this day, actually, that region is considered quite wealthy relative to other regions. Yeah, Jiangsu is a nice place. Qianlong's eel, eaten like Peking duck. All right. These are simple dishes you can find at pretty much every spot, but they won't be executed at this level. Obviously, as high as chili is. This is a jicai chao niang gao. So jicai is a very particular vegetable that they use. It's almost like a I want to say like a Chinese arugula. You're going to see this used in fried rice where you're going to see white and green fried rice, oftentimes at Shanghainese restaurants. This is what it is. Jicai chao niang gao. This is the luffa. Luffa is a type of vegetable that comes from Chili's special supplier. So I think you're going to find this more in China than in America. I've actually never had luffa until I got to this restaurant. But this is a banger dish, too. Yeah, they look like green noodles, but it's really more like shaved like a zucchini cucumber. It's better than zucchini. It does kind of taste like a zucchini stem. It's very soft. The garlic is very subtle, but but strong and apparent at the same time. It's like buttery zucchini, but less bitter. Andrew, this is zui ji. This is wine chicken. You can find this at every single level of, you know, Jiangnan Shanghainese restaurant here. Obviously, they got the goji berries on top, you know, some flowers and stuff a little bit elevated, more imperial. But you can find this anywhere. For me, sort of like the longjing shrimp with the green tea flavor. I'm looking for a strong wine flavor. I want winos and alcoholics to go for this. OK, last but not least, we got a sweet ceremonial dish. It means good luck. You're going to eat it more for dessert. It's very popular in the region. You won't find these everywhere else in China. This is a date that's been pitted. It's been split in half. And then they kind of put the little rice mochi on the middle. Hmm. It tastes a lot like che gao. Che gao is like a sticky rice date cake that for me, Andrew, it's like one of my favorite things to eat. Yo, that was so dope to try like elevated Shanghainese food for the imperial Song dynasty. I think one thing that you guys will notice is that in a lot of parts of China, not all, there's like sort of like two different cuisines. There's an imperial cuisine and then like a layman's cuisine. It's the same thing in Beijing, because society for so long was so hierarchical and stratified that people literally ate like two completely different things in the same city. So not all the spots that we go to are going to be this fancy. But what I hope is that you're going to see a lot of kind of Shanghainese region dishes that you have never seen before, because I think a lot of people, they're used to the xiaolongbao, they're used to the Shanghai chow mein and things like that. You know, your regular Shanghainese dishes that are very legit and very good themselves, but it goes way deeper than that. Beyond xiaolongbao. Today, we're going to be checking out authentic foods from Wuxi, Hangzhou, Shanghai and more. Some of it's going to be very authentic, some of it not as much, but we're going to be learning the whole journey. So hopefully next time, you know what Chinese food you like, don't like. And most importantly, what Chinese food you're actually eating. Aren't you guys? We are at Little Alley right now in Midtown. This did get a Michelin recommendation in 2020. This was started by a group of Shanghainese friends here in New York City. Let's get into it. I mean, we're looking at the starters right here. This is the malanto with candoufu. So this is really representative of the Water Town regions and the cooking techniques because of the meticulous knife work. If you guys ever see somebody just going dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. That is representative of jiangsu sucai, huaiyangcai. Very light, you know a lot of Shanghainese food, you could kind of compare it to Japanese food. Moving on, finishing off our Shanghainese starters, you've got the crispy eel. If you look at that region, they're very much trying to take freshwater eel. They're just trying to accentuate the eel through the use of vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, simple. Over here, we've got shrimp noodles. This is actually a super slept on dish. I actually want to say that this is one of the most slept on dishes in the entire Chinese lexicon. This dish is incredibly underrated. This has dried shrimp, real shrimp. It has a lot of stir-fried scallions, and it's almost like an oil noodle, almost like a youpuo mian, but more of the Shanghainese oil scallion shrimp noodle. I'm just gonna go with the fork. This is a banger dish. Do not sleep on the shrimp with dried shrimp noodle. Another thing about the Watertown regions, you know, your Jiangsu, your Zhejiang, your Shanghai, your Anhui, there's actually a ton of Buddhist traditions there. This is gluten, honey kofu, whole sweet vegetarian. As you can see, everything sort of shares a similar color profile due to the qiqiang, you know, light black vinegar, soy braise. Of course, this one throws in the addition of heavy ginger. This is crispy fried eel right here, guys. Kind of a controversial dish because a lot of people don't like eel, but to me, the eel has been sliced into thin strips, almost like a calamari. You don't eat the whole squid, you don't eat the whole eel. The qiqiang vinegar is strong with this one. I've got to say, between this and the xiaodanmian, these were my two favorite, easily five out of five. All right, you guys, the mains have arrived here at Little Alley. Like we said, there used to be only four main Chinese cuisines. It was lu, su, yue, and chuan, right? So lu and su, they kind of compete to see who's like the originator of all Chinese food. This is su, jiang su. Lu, lu guo was more like Shandong. That's where Confucius is from, also where our mom's from. But our grandma is from the su side, so shout out to jiang su. Su cai, which is what we're actually talking about in this video, breaks down into a bunch of different subdivisions. And one of the more royal subdivisions is huaiyang cai. You guys know that Chinese love the double, triple entendres when it comes to naming food. This is a squirrel fish. I heard it is because when you cut up the fish, this dish looks like pine cones, squirrels like pine cones, squirrel fish. You draw the connection, you see the dominoes fall. Honestly, guys, this is just an ultra high quality sweet and sour with all natural ingredients. No fillers, no substitutes. Western people would like this fish. They would like the flavor, but in terms of form, you probably need to make it a filet. Like we were saying, there's a lot of subdivisions of su cai, jiang su, water town food. This is actually for sure part of the huaiyang cuisine. Boom, you guys, you got a quail egg right in the middle. A lot of different people do their own version of this. I know Taiwanese people really like their own version, but this is a more elevated classical Shanghainese style. Lion's head meatball. This is probably the largest meatball in Chinese cooking. It's like a zongzi without the rice and the mung bean, but the meat is being the rice and the mung bean. All right, so here you have your eel dish with ginger scallion. Now this is gonna be a little bit different than the crispy eel because you can still kind of see the eel pieces, and I think that bothers some people. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a huge fan of eel usually, but they've kind of removed a lot of the visually disturbing aspects of the eel, so you can't really tell what you're eating. It almost looks like mushrooms or a type of noodle. Hong po rou, this is the red braised pork belly, and this actually, the story behind this is really interesting. It's named after a guy named Su Dong Po, and he was like a famous poet and writer and pharmacist back in the day. He perfected this recipe, and that's what I love about Chinese cooking is that there's just so many stories behind it. Now whether or not they're 100% true, we'll never really know, but the fact is Chinese love their stories and they love their meaning. This is crispy duck. It resembles a lot more of the Cantonese fried chicken than it does Peking duck, let's be honest, but I love that there's different styles of fried and roasted duck. Think about it. Think of how deep the cuisine has to go for there to be different styles of crispy duck. You know, eels are really polarizing because it does remind people of snakes, and I'm not gonna lie, maybe that's one of the reasons why I don't usually love it, but man, this one looks good, and they really clean it up for you here. I gotta say, for better or for worse, it doesn't really taste like eel, and for me personally, I like that, but it has still some of that fishy flavor in there. Strong ginger scallion. So this Dong Po pork does fall underneath the Huayang cuisine, so, and I think the cool thing is a lot of these dishes are named after poets. The crispy duck may not be, but this one is. You know, naming this the Dong Po pork is kind of like naming something like the Edgar Allen Po pork or something, you know? It's just because in Chinese culture, they just revere poets and scholars so much. I'm gonna eat it with this bun. Now, eating it with the white bun is actually not super, super traditional, but I think with the rise of the popularity of the Taiwanese guobao, I think that it makes sense to start serving this especially at a modern spot like Little Alley. Another trait of this dish is that the pork is so soft, I can chop it with my chopsticks. There's a great ratio between fat and meat, and I know that it's red, so it looks very sweet and sour, but actually the flavor's pretty light. I might even have to drizzle some of this chili oil on top. Ooh! And just eat it straight up. Wrapping up here at Little Alley, like I said, I would say the dishes here are a little bit more centric on the royal, sort of like festive, a little bit fancier than your average Shanghainese spot-type dishes. We're looking at the tangyuan, which is something that you eat during Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year. They're filled with sesame balls. I happen to like the coconut milk version, which is more southern of me, but these look really like they have a good ratio. Let me get in there. Actually, the wine flavor's very subtle here. Some other tangyuan soups have an incredibly wine-flavored version. There's no real standardization on this. There's maybe 10 to 20 different kinds of tangyuan. You can get little ones, big ones, different flavorings. All right, you guys, we are at Tipsy Shanghai right now. Andrew, we are not at Joe's Shanghai. This is not your typical Shanghai fried noodles, and you have your big xiaolongbao here. This is very, very traditional. Oh, this is like exactly what our grandmother, Oala Tsai-Heng-Yin, ate all the time. Andrew, we are looking at dishes, again, very traditional Shanghainese homestyle cooking right here. These are just tiny braised shrimps. So you can't actually peel everyone, knowing you, Andrew, you're not gonna do that. You're just gonna eat it. Oh, no, man. I might eat the whole thing. Yeah, I'm gonna- Definitely eat the whole thing. That was super good. Wow. That was relatively even better than the fish. That was packing the flavor. All right, David, these are the wuxi xiaolongbao, not Shanghai style. Once you bust them open, Andrew, you'll see. Why don't you show the people why the wuxi style is different? And to some people, it's better. I feel like the soup is a little bit sweeter. It's a little bit more, almost sugary, to be honest. And I will say, this is a really sweet xiaolongbao right here. All right, Andrew, I'm breaking down the ao zhao mian right here. Ao zhao mian, fish noodle with chicken broth. That's a really unique flavor because you're mixing the fish and the chicken broth. The drinkability of that broth is five out of five, man. I could drink that whole thing. It wouldn't feel heavy or overdone or anything. All right, this is a bamboo with tofu knot pork broth soup. I mean, listen, you got tender pieces of pork. These tofu knots here, if you've never had them, I actually don't know the Chinese name, but they're delicious. And then you have large pieces of bamboo. And bamboo is something that you're gonna find in kind of wuxi cooking a lot. Large pieces of pork with the fat. Bro, I can't even tell which is pork and what's bamboo. I'll tell you this, they love bamboo. We're talking about tender bamboo, young bamboo, old bamboo, water bamboo. There are so many different types of bamboo. That region, the water town region of cooking. Moving on, Andrew, this is the Shanghai smoked fish. Now I know wuxi also does a smoked fish, but I don't think it's as saucy as this one. Now it's not actually smoked. And if you made me bet that's partially due to just logistics of not wanting to smoke fish back there because smoking is a long process. So I think they fry it and glaze it. It tasted similar to the wuxi style, but way saucier. Anyway, the food is usually light, sweet, mild with a lot of light vinegar and cooking wine accents. Bamboo is often used to draw out the umami flavor and most things are cooked with a tender, soft texture. The main focus is maintaining the original flavor of the item being highlighted, whether that be a meat or veggie. All right, everybody, that wraps it up here at Tipsy Shanghai, but we got another spot to go to. So we're here at Three Times. The owner is from Hangzhou. The owner of the previous spot was from wuxi. So this is pretty interesting. So they all have Shanghainese food on the menu, but they all have a few things that represent their very ultra specific city, they're from, Andrew, leading off, it's the Nurofen Sitang. This is Hangzhou only. I heard that this is the number one breakfast in Hangzhou, not in Shanghai, Hangzhou. Right, you know what? I've been to a lot of Shanghainese restaurants and I've never seen this dish until I came here to Three Times, where the owner makes it a point to serve certain Hangzhou dishes because he wants to rep the hometown because maybe a lot of people, they're not familiar with Hangzhou food. And there's not a lot of Hangzhou restaurants. You know what the interesting thing is, Andrew? Shanghai is the most dominant city in that region, but Shanghai itself is not a water town. Hangzhou and Suzhou are water towns. So this beef soup is pretty simple. You have the feng si, and then you have your sliced beef and it's kind of like a spicy soy sauce broth right here. It's very, very simple. Great for breakfast, gonna get you started on your day. This is a dish that actually is popular in Nanjing, but like, I feel like not popular in America. Nanjing yazi, yazi is duck, Nanjing ducks. It's a cold duck dish. Listen, it's not bad, but by all means, it is a cold, sauceless duck. This is also very unique, very Shanghainese. This has got radish on the inside and some salted ham, I believe. And then over here, Andrew, we've got ones that are, I've got more of a sweet pastry over here. These were the hottest out of all the things, man. So these are Shanghainese, what they call, I believe they call clamshell pastries. Very crispy and flaky. Overall, pretty good. So what's interesting about these Shanghai huanduan, huanduan is how you say in Mandarin, how you say wonton. Let me show you. On the inside, Andrew, they have this very particular vegetable called jicai, and it's almost got its own flavor, almost like a sharp arugula. And I love how the wonton broth has a little bit of wine in there. Like we said, Shanghainese food, very heavy on the wine. Stir-fried rice cakes with pork. This is a popular dish that you'd probably find at any standard Shanghainese spot. Between the restaurants of Tipsy Shanghai and Three Times So Far, you can tell that the flavors are a little bit lighter. It's cleaner. There's not too much grease. There's not a lot of spice either, but overall, very, very easy to eat. Here, we have the very traditional Shanghai xiaomai. They look just like the Cantonese xiaomai, like the siu mai that you'll get at dim sum, except it's the sticky rice and pork mixture inside instead of pork, shrimp, and mushroom. Let's take a look. It's the same wrapper, though. Top's open. They dropped the top. These, you will find at all times in the morning. I mean, this is like essentially a rice dump. Last but not least, David, we have the second most famous bao from the Shanghai region, which is the shenjin bao. David, do you know if the filling is usually pretty similar to a xiaolongbao? I feel like it is. Yeah, it does feel like it's still got the same braised meat, shenjin bao. Oh, I'll tell you here, here at Three Times, these are really good. I don't even like shenjin bao. To be honest, everywhere I get them, because I think it's such an easy dish to mess up, because there's like steaming elements and frying elements. This one's good. I would say Three Times has an amazing ratio of bao to meat, to fried side. Bao is fluffy enough, but it's not too fluffy. Man, this one's good. All right, Andrew, we're wrapping up here at Three Times as we continue our sort of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui crawl. What was your favorite thing? Honestly, my favorite thing here at Three Times, you know, like we said, this is kind of like a Hangzhou spot, are these clamshell pastries. Those were really good, and especially try the radish one with ham. My favorite thing here that you've got to get is the shenjin bao. It's just fluffy enough, the size is right there, it's crispy on the bottom, just enough juice. Hey, overall, guys, you know, they still got some dishes here at Three Times, again, that are really good. All right, you guys, so we are at 456 New Shanghai Restaurant. This is really representative. Basically, the New York style of xiaolongbao is gonna have a lot more juice, the skin is gonna be thicker to accommodate the larger size to prevent it from breaking, but even versus the Shanghainese style, I think that the oil and the gelatin is gonna be much thicker. To be honest, you know, after looking at a lot of people's tables here, they're not really making it beyond the xiaolongbao or maybe the fried chow mein, you know. They're keeping it super basic. Now, here's the thing about Shanghainese food in America, it's really interesting because that overall Shanghai region, like we've been talking about in this video, has like hundreds of dishes, but most people in America, when they say they like Shanghainese food, they're really only talking about three to maybe five different dishes. So actually, guys, if you guys have ever been to a din tai fung from Taiwan originally, but now globally, they have restaurants everywhere, you're gonna find a lot of these dishes because din tai fung, despite being from Taipei, Taiwan, is Shanghainese based. So for example, this is tai tiao yu. This is a seaweed fried fish specific to the Shanghai region. You probably could get it around Shanghai, but really this is where it's from. We are at a New York style Shanghainese restaurant, which is a little bit more Americanized. They do give you the salt here. This is authentic. So it's really interesting. Everything on the table here is authentic, but it just looks different, slightly, in form. This is actually a Shanghainese dessert right here. I think they also eat it in Ningbo, if I'm not mistaken. This is very traditional. I do not think a lot of young people would order this. This would be something definitely for the older crowd. This is zui ji, aka drunken chicken. And man, this just really also epitomizes the region because it's so light, and it just uses wine as the primary flavoring, keeping the ingredients, whether it's the shrimp or the chicken, in such a clean format. I mean, that is very, very, very emblematic of the Jiangsu region. All right, and our last appetizer here, we have the aromatic beef. Now this is like a kind of boiled beef shank that's been marinated in some seasoning. I'm not gonna lie, some other spots, they give you like a side dip, something for you to put it in, some vinegar or soy sauce, but they're just telling you just to eat the beef straight up. I thought that beef was gonna be dry. It is not. I'm feeling the aromatics. We are looking at a zui ji, a pork pump, aka a pork shoulder right now. Now this is a pretty authentic dish. I wanna say the color, it's a little bit more red at the New York Shanghainese spots. If you wanna talk about fatty Christmas hams, guys, can't beat this. Guys, Shanghai has everything from xiaolongbao to gigantic pork pumps. Visually they look different, but flavor profile wise, pretty similar gelatinous pork. So between the Chinatown Shanghainese restaurants and the new ones that have just opened three years ago that are catering more towards the international student population, I mean, listen, there's a place for everything and each has its own history. There's one that's coming straight from China right now, you know, the WeChat generation. And then there's this one that is, you know, 30, maybe 40 years old, where they're serving General Tso's here at a Shanghainese restaurant. And this is not even particularly a Shanghainese dish at all. I think for a lot of American people who are diving into Chinese food, some of their first restaurants that they went to was like a Joe's Shanghai where they just got the fried noodles and xiaolongbaos. And those type of dishes got them hooked and were serving as a gateway for them to get deeper into Chinese food. So I think that's great. So that's it for episode one of Which Chinese Food Are You Eating? We hope that you have a better idea of what Chinese Watertown regional dishes are and what the flavors are supposed to be. Hopefully you saw some sweet or vinegary dishes that you really wanna try now. And it's dope that we didn't even have to leave the city. There's actually so much deep cut, authentic Chinese food in Manhattan, you just gotta look around. And some might wonder why two Chinese Americans are doing this series. Well, maybe we're Chinese enough to feel close to the culture, but American enough to stay curious. So let me know what you think about Shanghainese food in general down below, what your favorite dish is, and be on the lookout for episode two.